Harvard's new curriculum plan

Parents Forum
1

<p>Maybe they want to displace Rhodes from the top of the ISI list?</p>

<p>If the proposal passes, they would be one of very few colleges in the country to require all students to study US history:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Under the new recommendations, students would be required to complete one half-course in each of seven areas—“Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change,” “The Ethical Life,” “The United States,” “Societies of the World,” “Reason and Faith,” “Life Sciences,” and “Physical Sciences.”

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</p>

<p><a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514668%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514668&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>(Note: one half-course just means a regular one semester class.)</p>

<p>In addition, they would be the only secular college I know to require all students to study religion, though in Harvard's case, this would be history of religion or comparative religion or a dispassionate philosophical analysis of religion, not the study of the doctrine per se.</p>

2

<p>I'd guess "Reason and Faith" includes philosophy classes.</p>

<p>I have to say, I lean towards the Brown model. Trust the kid. Surprisingly my son hasn't looked at all into these issues, if it were me I would.</p>

3

<p>
[quote]
I'd guess "Reason and Faith" includes philosophy classes

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I was just thinking more clearly about what those "Reason and Faith" classes might consist of--and edited my post to add philosophical analysis at the same time you were posting your thought.</p>

<p>I wonder if a class on "creationism vs. evolution" would count both as a "Reason and Faith" and as "Life Sciences" class?</p>

<p>EDIT: More details are here:
<a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514669%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514669&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>and here:
<a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514667%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514667&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The first article indicates that "Religion and Faith" is perhaps the most likely requirement to be cut.</p>

4

<p>Somehow this sounds suspiciously like the Core, slightly consolidated and tweaked, under a different set of names. And with Quantitative Reasoning split out as a standalone requirement, rather than a Core. ("They would also have to study a third “critical skill,” analytical reasoning, which would encompass some of the Core’s current quantitative reasoning area but would also include courses on non-mathematical analysis.")</p>

<p>Based on the story, the main difference seems to be that the current Core courses that have a more narrow focus would no longer count under the new Core. But unless they want to have even larger classes than they currently have under the Core system, they're going to have to find a way to replace the classes that no longer count with classes that do count. So sooner or later, my guess is that they'll end up in roughly the same place they are now. If this is all that curricular review is going to come to, I'm not sure I'd bother.</p>

5

<p>
[quote]
In addition, they would be the only secular college I know to require all students to study religion,

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</p>

<p>Not exactly--all students at Columbia (at least the College) read excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Koran, Buddhist and Hindu texts, etc. So no class is formally called a "Religion" class, but much religion is studied. I imagine that's true at some of the other Core curriculum/mandatory Great Books schools, like Chicago, Reed, and of course St. Johns.</p>

6

<p>Scripps will remain the only college in the country with a core that makes sense for ALL students (and a way to manage it well).</p>

7

<p>Why do you think Scripps' core makes sense. It's almost totally humanities based. Not a whiff of science or math in it at all. I liked Harvard's old general education requirements just fine. You could take three broad courses (2 semesters each) in each of three areas Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Science or substitute 2 semesters of departmental courses for any one of the broader courses. It gave a certain flexibility and insured that everyone had a little bit of knowledge across the disciplines with plenty of room in the schedule for your major and interests outside your major. The only person I know who I thought abused the spirit of it was my first boyfriend who fulfilled his humanities requirement with lower level language courses. He took a lot of them too - Greek, Hebrew, Spanish and German as I recall.</p>

8

<p>Interestingly, the Chicago Core Curriculum, at least, does NOT necessarily involve any study of religion. The areas covered by the core are Humanities, Social Science, Civilization, Physical Science, Drama/Art/Music, Math, and Foreign Language, with the first three having their own special courses. Students choose from seven sequences to satisfy their Humanities requirements, that focus on, respectively, world literature, philosophy, the Greek tradition, civics, writing, anthropology, and media studies. Only a couple of these use explicitly religious texts (e.g., Augustine's Confessions is featured in only one of the sequences). I am pretty certain my daughter's anthropology-focused course did not. Obviously, many of the available Civilization courses deal with religion, some more than others (e.g., options in Jewish and Islamic culture), but it is not a major focus of most of them (and probably half of the students satisfy their "Civ" requirement by doing study-abroad programs). I think it would absolutely be possible to make it through the Chicago Core without ever reading the Bible or the Qu'ran, or studying religious thought other than as part of historical context for a particular civilization or body of literature. In general, the materials covered in the Chicago Core (at least the European materials) tend to leap from the Greeks to the Enlightenment.</p>

<p>(People at Chicago are touchy about having its Core lumped in with Great Books programs, although some of options within the Core are Great Booksish.)</p>

9

<p>I guess the Columbia and Chicago Cores are more different than i'd realized.</p>

<p>At Columbia, all freshmen take the same two semester Lit Hum course (not Great Books but similar) among other things. Then soph year they all take "contemporary Civilization" basically an overview of philosophy, political theory, and the like. (there are lots of other parts to the Core, too.) Within these two "core" Core courses, they all read the same religious texts.</p>

10

<p>"Why do you think Scripps' core makes sense."</p>

<p>The Scripps core makes sense (and let's be clear, we are not talking about "distributional requirements" or "gen. ed.") because instead of focusing on a set of books, it focuses on ways of knowing, methods of discourse (including science and math), and methods of inquiry. Rather than getting stuck in the discussion of what "stuff" (i.e. texts) needs to be known, they have advanced the discussion radically toward a student-based approach of how you would "know it". And they have employed their entire faculty to figure it out.</p>

<p>I taught in the Chicago core. It doesn't hold a candle to what Scripps is doing.</p>

<p>(But P.S. In my view - as regards "all students", Great Books is what high school is for.)</p>

11

<p>Well maybe I blipped over the math and science methods of discourse, but I didn't see it on their website. Looking more closely I see a tiny bit in Core 1, one "Math in our culture" in Core 3 and nothing in Core 2.</p>

12

<p>They have the courses. But they use (and teach the relevance of) both statistical and scientific methods in analysis in Core I. (Science faculty are heavily involved in developing the questions the core seeks to address - it was actually a major reason they went through a substantial revision back in the mid-90s.)</p>

13

<p>Reed College also has a year long inquiry based humanities core (Hum 110) that all students must take. It appears to have a good dose of religion as well as philosophy. <a href="http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/hum110/index.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/hum110/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

14

<p>Mini's description of the Scripps core is accurate (and the distinction made between "core" and "gen ed" is a valuable one). Scripps' core is divided into 3 semesters, the 2nd and 3rd of which focus largely on the application of ideas from core 1. The actual topics of core 2 and 3, which are sometimes math/science-y, are more or less irrelevant to the overall mission of the program, and the unbelievable well-roundedness of core 1 is not immediately apparent from its title or description.</p>

<p>Core 1 is team taught by professors from across the disciplines, math/science included. The readings and lessons change slightly year to year, but my readings included Descartes, Galileo, Darwin, Bacon, and the play Copenhagen, just to name a few that are particularly relevant to this discussion (and remain memorable 3 years down the road). As mini explained, the emphasis of the program is not on "how much important science (or whatever) 'stuff' can they read," but rather, is on having students read things that demonstrate modes of thinking, methods of argument, and great intellectual/philosophical questions and movements. As such, the readings and lectures all include historical context and plenty of "who said what," but also emphasize philosophy and critical analysis. Ideally, students come away not just knowing that "this great scientist said X" and "this Cuban revolutionary did Y," but also being able to understand relationships between the two.</p>

<p>I can successfully tutor core even though its current content is vastly different than I experienced, because its lessons transcend specific topics and figures. Comparisons can and are constantly drawn between it and other programs, but it's pretty unique (for better or worse).</p>

<p>...anyway, getting way off track, but I did want to clarify. The program is true to its interdisciplinary claims.</p>

15

<p>I didn't think Core 1 looked so wonderful from the website description, but I'll take your word for it. I actually think the course sounds like fun. I don't think a one year course is too onerouse though after that I'd much rather just have some gen. ed. requirements myself. But that's the fun of the US university system, there are so many choices. If I care that much I can find a university that will let me take what I want to. (By the way I loved the play Copenhagen - see it if you can!)</p>

16

<p>that sounds great. But anyone who thinks that other Core courses in other schools are all about memorizing "who said what" is badly mistaken. I know that making connections, analyzing the influences of ideas, and all that other higher order stuff certainly was the basis of my S's Core courses.</p>

<p>I think it's a little dismissive to make assumptions that other respected schools only concntrate on "how much you can cram in" while one school gets it right. But that makes for flashier posts, I guess.</p>

17

<p>I certainly did not intend to state that other schools are awful and one alone gets things right. Personally, I don't know how most other schools' core programs work or exactly what it is that sets Scripps' apart. The fact that I didn't draw comparisons to specific schools or talk about anyone else's strengths are because I don't know them at all, and can't claim to. The only point in question was whether one particular school's core does in fact include certain topics, and it does. No flash.</p>

<p>(And I did see Copenhagen...it was fantastic...thank you!)</p>

18

<p>FWIW, Princeton has a distribution requirement that includes an Ethics component -- which often combines with religion on the one hand, philosophy on the other. Additionally, freshman Humanities curriculum mandates scriptural study to some degree. However, reading sacred texts can, and is often, done in secular settings from perspectives of literature & myth, not necessarily theologically, polemically. (Bad syntax; you get the point.)</p>

<p>I think adults who consider themselves educated should know the core beliefs of the world's major religions as a matter of cultural literacy, not to mention political awareness. (Not to be confused with political correctness.)</p>

19

<p>hum 110 is a year long course required for all freshmen- it pretty much takes the place of freshman english & history
These were teh required texts the year D was a freshman( I didn't even bother adding the recommended text ;) )
It was seminar style class most days, as well as lecture.
She enjoyed it for the most part, especially lectures by profs in depts that she was not going to get to see much of otherwise.</p>

<p>
[quote]

HUMANITIES 110 - List of Books
FALL, 2001
Required Texts:
Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Lloyd-Jones (California)
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, trans. Arrowsmith (Michigan)
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin (Hackett)
Curd (ed.), A Presocratics Reader (Hackett)
Essays on Ancient Greece (Pamphlet / Bookstore)
Euripides, Phoenician Women, The Bacchae, ed. Grene and Lattimore (Chicago)
Freeman, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford)
Herodotus, The History, trans. de Selincourt (Penguin)
Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield, trans. Lombardo (Hackett)
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Lattimore (Chicago)
Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Hackett)
Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (Harvard)
Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. Grube (Hackett)
Plato, Plato’s Republic, 2nd ed., trans. Grube/Reeve (Hackett)
Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Yale)
Sophocles, Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, ed. Grene and Lattimore (Chicago)
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, Warner (Penguin)</p>

<p>Spring 2001</p>

<p>Required Texts:
Apuleius, trans. Lindsay, The Golden Ass (Indiana University Press)
Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony the Great (Eastern)
Augustine, Confessions (Oxford University Press)
Beard and Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (in bookstore and on reserve)
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha/ New Revised Standard Version: College Edition (Oxford University Press)
Brown, World of Late Antiquity (W. W. Norton)
Garnsey, Peter and Richard Saller, Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (University of California Press)
Josephus, The Jewish War (Penguin USA)
Livy, Early History of Rome (Penguin USA)
Lucretius, The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura) (Indiana University Press)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford World Classics)
Readings on the Roman World (Pamphlet in Bookstore)
Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca (W. W. Norton)
Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (Penguin USA)
Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin USA)
Virgil, The Aeneid (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publications)

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<p>pretty much lots of dead white guys- just ask Pancho Savery</p>

20

<p>
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In addition, they would be the only secular college I know to require all students to study religion.

[/quote]

Wake Forest requires one course each in religion, philosophy, and history, as well as other curriculum requirements. Considering the amount of attention given to Wake on these boards, I'm not surprised it hasn't been mentioned.</p>